Urban Designs from South Korea: Jihoi Lee

*This talk is hybrid (in-person & remote). Capacity is limited. Please register ahead of time.

About Streaming Platforms as Sites for Multilateral Collaboration Between Museums

Watch and Chill is a subscription-based streaming platform for contemporary art developed by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Planned as a three-year project, Watch and Chill holds the online experience at its core while experimenting with syncing online exhibitions and their on-scene engagements. The project started during the COVID-19 pandemic with sympathetic discussions among curators of museums in other countries who shared the challenge of losing audiences. Mobilizing the liquid quality of media collections that exist as digital data, Watch and Chill has been a breakthrough during a period of restricted mobility. Over the course of three seasons from 2021 to 2023, Watch and Chill has collaborated with eight museums in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. During this time, the meaning and tendencies of the usage of the streaming platform have shifted. The project proved the possibility of international collaboration—with commitment, curiosity, and trust—using only video calls and the Internet. Despite the fact that we resumed travel and direct contact with people after decreased COVID-19 measures, we now think differently about exhibition making in physical space because of wars, the environment, and other ethical reasons. Watch and Chill continues to experiment with decentralized curatorial practice based on an online platform and supplementary physical exhibitions (and the shifted hierarchy of on-/offline), as well as the circularity between the immersive experience of the audience on site and the takeaway, virtual experience of the audience on personal devices.

About the Speaker

Jihoi Lee (she/her) isCurator of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea (2017–present). At MMCA, she initiated the Watch and Chill online streaming platform, a project accompanied by an offline traveling showcase in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and other regions (2021–2023). She also curated the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020, Haegue Yang—O2 & H2O, and Architecture and Heritage: Unearthing Future (2019); organized The Essential Duchamp (2018) with the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and curated both a retrospective screening program of Beka & Lemoine: Through the Lens of Domesticity (2018) and Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity, a symposium and a publication project with e-flux Architecture (2017). Previously, she curated Imagining New Eurasia, a three-year research exhibition project with Kyong Park at the Asia Cultural Center, Gwangju (2015–2017), and was deputy curator and managing director for the Korean Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, which won the Golden Lion. She received a BA in Fine Art (Studio Practice and Contemporary Critical Studies) from Goldsmiths and a MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at GSAPP, Columbia University.

About Urban Designs from South Korea: Architecture, Ecology and Communities from South Korea

This series will present various designers from South Korea, who are engaged in urban and rural regeneration projects, graphic art, video projects and other projects that are taking place in South Korea. Presenters will discuss why design is crucial in Architecture, Ecology and Communities in South Korea.

Many of the speakers in this series will be presenting their works in the Project “2086: Together How?” that will be presented in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale in Italy, opening on May 20th, 2023. Presenters include “2086: Together How?” co-curator Soik Jung (Urban Mediation Project), and exhibitors, architect Yerin Kang (Society of Architecture), graphic artist Chris Ro (founder of ADearFriend) and video artist Jaekyung Jung (founder of shhh).

Bringing together architects, community leaders and artists, this project is about how we might be working together to endure current and future environmental crises until 2086 – the year when the global population is supposed to peak. Through a participatory video game, and with photographs, drawings, models and video and architectural installations, the exhibition is designed to invite audiences to imagine an ecocultural revolution through a critical reassessment of our capitalist, globalist, and colonial history.

They will present various communities with active regeneration projects in South Korea, inside the global city of Incheon, the colonial historic center in the mid-size city of Gunsan and in the rural areas of foreign migrant workers in Gyeonggi Province. These locations constitute a cross section of urbanization, modernization, and westernization in South Korea. They will show their collaboration with the local community leaders, and their ideas and design for the future of these communities. Each community is a case study which utilizes the community leader’s deep knowledge of the place and the architect’s spatial analysis to evaluate its current state, and propose site-specific future scenarios leading up to 2086.